Δ GLOVES IN ACTION - Embracing messiness and conflict

Green Room Exhibition

9th July - 30th August 2015

Guest curator Syafiatudina presents her findings on the significance of the amateur researchers’ pursuit of knowledge for museums and their educational mandate. This exhibition was created in the Weltkulturen Labor in cooperation with Frankfurt’s private collectors and participants with an interest in culture and the arts.

GLOVES IN ACTION proposes to create a contact zone, which also embraces the potential of conflict and messiness as a learning process, within the museum. It's a space for co-production, co-operation, and redistribution of knowledge based on ethnographic objects. The exhibition can be seen as a research centre where visitors can observe the objects and build their methodology to analyse them. This idea stems from the principle that people are entitled to participate in the formation of knowledge and its distribution. Thus our individual knowledge becomes the knowledge of all.

Including an interactive lab room, films as well as ethnographic objects from Indonesia, New Guinea and Guatemala.

Syafiatudina is a fellow of the programme "Curators in Residence - Curating Collections" of the foundation KfW Stiftung and a member of KUNCI Cultural Studies Center in Yogyakarta. In Indonesia, KUNCI is regarded as a cultural studies pioneer and regularly organises artistic research and exhibitions. Founded in Yogyakarta in 1999, KUNCI has primarily focused on critical knowledge production and sharing via media publications, cross-disciplinary encounters, research actions and artistic interventions.

KfW Stiftung's programme "Curators in Residence” offers outstanding young curators from Latin America, Africa and Asia a chance to spend several months in Germany with the objective of promoting intercultural exchange in exhibition practice.

Weltkulturen Labor, Schaumainkai 37
Tue-Sun, 11am-6pm and Wed, 11am-8pm
Entrance: €3 / reduced €1.50

schließen

Δ EL HADJI SY: PAINTING, PERFORMANCE, POLITICS

5th March 2015 – 18th October 2015

In the mid-1970s, in a pioneering move, the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt began collecting contemporary artworks from Africa. Today it has over 3000 paintings, prints and sculptures in its collection.

In 1985, the museum commissioned the artist and curator El Hadji Sy (born 1954 in Dakar) with the task of assembling a new group of works of contemporary art from Senegal, thereby initiating a long-term relationship between Frankfurt and Dakar.

Thirty years later, as part of its programmatic investigation into its collection, the Weltkulturen Museum is proud to present a retrospective of El Hadji Sy’s career as a painter and cultural activist whose seminal involvement with the museum preceded the so-called global turn of 1989.

The exhibition, which is co-curated by Philippe Pirotte, director of the Städelschule and Portikus, combines El Hadji Sy’s installations and paintings – sometimes executed with his bare feet or produced on unusual surfaces such as industrial rice sacking or synthetic kite silk – with his selection of ethnographic objects and artworks by colleagues from Senegal. The exhibition includes loans from international private collections in addition to works from the Weltkulturen Museum.

As a founder of the notorious collective Laboratoire AGIT’ART, and a curator of numerous artist-led workshops and studio spaces in Dakar, El Hadji Sy’s interdisciplinary practice represents a ground-breaking position within the context of post-independence Africa.

A comprehensive monograph with unseen archival material, essays and interviews by Hans Belting, Clémentine Deliss, Mamadou Diouf, Julia Grosse, Yvette Mutumba, Philippe Pirotte and Manon Schwich is published by diaphanes in English and German.

In 2016 the exhibition will be on display at the National Galery Prag (Národní galerie v Praze) and at Castle Ujazdowski, Centre for Contemporary Art Warsaw (Centrum Sztuki Wspólczesnej Zamek Ujazdowskizu).

Weltkulturen Museum
Schaumainkai 29
60594 Frankfurt

Tues – Sun, 11am – 6pm, Wed, 11am – 8pm
Entrance: €7 / reduced €3.50

schließen